Book Review: ‘Scattergood,’ by H.M. Bouwman

SCATTERGOOD, by H.M. Bouwman

Narrated by 13-year-old Peggy Mott, part of a loving, tight-knit farm community, H.M. Bouwman’s new middle grade novel brims from the get-go with engaging details — the particulars of milking cows, snooping on telephone party lines, bathing without indoor plumbing — that pull us easily into the frugal yet comfortable world of West Branch, Iowa, in 1941.

But Peggy’s world is about to change.

In the same week that a dreamy 16-year-old German boy named Gunther arrives at Scattergood (a local Quaker school turned hostel for refugees fleeing the Nazis), she learns that her 14-year-old best friend and cousin, Delia, has been diagnosed with leukemia. In short order, Peggy’s interest in Gunther leads her to another man at the hostel, a Dutch professor whose family, like Gunther’s, is “disappeared.” (“Even I knew what disappeared meant,” Peggy notes ruefully. “Hitler. The war.”)

Just as “the Professor” (with a capital P) refuses to give up the search for his wife and children, Peggy decides she will find a way to save Delia, who’s back in the hospital. Never mind that when she goes in search of a treatment for her friend’s disease she discovers pretty quickly that there isn’t one.

As Peggy scours the local library and the nearby college town of Iowa City for a cure, and then turns briefly to prayer, life continues in West Branch. Social dynamics shift and teen affections are rebuffed. People quarrel while pumpkins grow round on thick green vines.

Meanwhile, Delia grows sicker as Peggy and the Professor play chess and unpack their respective pain.

This mingling of tragic plotlines might sound a little heavy for middle grade readers, but in fact these intersections are the greatest strength of the book.

On its surface, “Scattergood” is both a cancer novel and a Holocaust narrative, but rather than weigh each other down these threads create a sort of shared logic — because while cancer and the Holocaust signal looming devastation, Peggy and the Professor continue to search, if not for a happy ending then for meaning and comfort within their pain. There’s a symmetry to that.

As Peggy exhausts the usefulness of science and prayer, she struggles to help her sick friend.

She writes Delia a note each day, which keeps her connected and forces her to see her own world more clearly: “Birds are the most beautiful animals, don’t you think, Dee? (Except chickens.) … Come home soon, strong and healthy, so you can watch them with me in the field behind your house.”

But letters can’t stop cancer, so when Delia leaves the hospital she asks Peggy for a different kind of help: “Find out something that can make me feel better. More — more ready.”

This is where “Scattergood” truly shines, because on some level it investigates not only whether we can survive great loss, but also how.

When Peggy turns to the Professor for guidance, he offers no satisfying answers, only Hasidic tales he himself doesn’t seem to believe. Then, in a sudden twist, Peggy’s first kiss sends her running once more to him, just as he has received terrible news from home. Swallowed by grief, he fails her, and what results is a sort of unleashing, as Peggy reels and acts out, setting off a chain of shocking and disastrous events.

Honestly, I was unprepared for this plot turn — blindsided. But then I stopped to think: Isn’t that precisely what happens in moments of tragedy? We falter in ways we couldn’t have anticipated, and emotions spiral beyond our control.

What is the proper response to a child’s pain at a time when she is growing into herself, seeking both care and independence? “I wondered,” Peggy tells us, “if there was any comfort that could last and that could be enough and that could work perfectly, without ruining everything around it.”

But that isn’t the end of the book! As we all must do in the aftermath of disaster, Peggy wakes the next day, picks up the threads of her story and continues. There is still tragedy to face, only now she faces it with a little more wisdom. The fact that she can’t fix everything doesn’t mean she can’t fix anything. As the Professor has explained it, “Free will versus providence. The age-old paradox … something that seems like a contradiction — but might not be.”

In this spirit of paradox, the end of “Scattergood” feels more like a beginning. Peggy has only just begun to understand herself, her power, her responsibility to others, and the journey ahead. The novel closes not with a prayer but with “a picture of a prayer, the kind of prayer you might make if you hoped, against your better judgment, that someone was listening.”

“Scattergood” is a brave, beautiful book, wise enough to reach for something beyond certainty.

SCATTERGOOD | By H.M. Bouwman | (Ages 10 and up) | Neal Porter/Holiday House | 320 pp. | $18.99